About the project

The SCOoPE project was granted for funding by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme in the call H2020-EE-2015-3-MarketUptake.

The SCOoPE Project objective is to reduce energy consumption, by implementing cost-effective energy solutions, at a short term in a range between 10% and 15% directly in 81 businesses in the sectors of crop drying, meat and poultry, dairy, and fruit and vegetables transformation.

This reduction should be achieved without any decrease in the production capacity of the companies and maintaining good socioeconomic and environmental conditions. For reaching these objectives, the project will work with the uptake of specific and cross-cutting innovative technologies and techniques, whose efficacy has been proven in other industrial sectors different from the agro-food sector, but not being familiar o rarely implemented in the agro-food sector.

On the other hand, the SCOoPE project pursues larger savings in the medium term with new affordable intelligent energy solutions, specifically by proving in operational environment the “Collaborative Energy Management Systems”.

It will take advantage of complementarities and synergies among analysed industrial sites with similar characteristics or proximity and will use them for the improvement of their joint energy efficiency. For this purpose, 6 pilot industrial clusters in 5 different countries will be set up and used for assessing the improvements in overall energy consumptions and its associated costs that could be achieved by using common procedures based on the ISO 50.001 standard and supported by specific software developed by the project.

Moreover, for the achievement of these objectives, the project is addressed to the direct involvement of equipment suppliers and financial institutions enabling the necessary investments to enhance energy efficiency in agro-food industries. These contacts between agro-food industries and Key Actors (technology providers and financial institutions) will also boost further collaborations between them, beyond project lifetime.

Finally, the project will deliver a reservoir of specially qualified human resources, fact-based knowledge and techniques, and customized software tools, that will be useful for and applicable to other thousands of European companies in the same agro-food subsectors or dealing with the same industrial processes. In this sense, strong dissemination and exchange of experiences from directly involved businesses to similar European companies will spur on the change in managers’ behaviour needed for a systematic focus on the continuous improvement of energy efficiency.

SCOoPE project expected outputs & results:

A benchmarking analysis of their energy consumption based on the obtained KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) will be carried out in each of the 81 involved cooperatives.

Self-assessment software< will be developed by the project, and so, any interested agro-industry will be able to do its benchmarking analysis too.

A collection of 200 KPIs on thermal and electric energy consumption in the four agro-food sectors will be gathered.

An Extended Value Stream Map for each target sector of the project will be issued and publicly available.

Professionals trained in benchmarking analysis

An on-line course for any interested technician wanting to be trained and to receive the certificate as “SCOoPE energy manager”.

Six pilot industrial clusters will be run during a year, in order to prove the advantages of managing collectively their energy by the “Collaborative Management Systems”, improving their energy efficiency and reducing its associated costs.

CIRCE, Research Centre for Energy Resources and Consumption, participates as trainer and expert in energy efficiency, and also is in charge of the training activities and the software tools developement.

ENEA, Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, participates as sectorial expert in fruit and vegetables sector and as expert in thermal energy consumptions, and it is also in charge of the organizational issues regarding clusters and “Collaborative energy management systems”.

UPM, Polytechnic University of Madrid, participates as sectorial expert in dairy sector and as expert in electric energy consumptions, and it is also in charge of the development of the Lean&Green methodology for describing the processes.